Doug Isbell/Don Savage
Headquarters, Washington, DC November 25, 1998
(Phone: 202/358-1547)
Donna Drelick/Jim Sahli
Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD
(Phone: 301-286-7995)
RELEASE: 98-213
SUBMILLIMETER WAVE ASTRONOMY
SATELLITE TO STUDY STAR FORMATION
NASA's Submillimeter Wave Astronomy Satellite (SWAS)
mission, scheduled for launch at 8:40 p.m. EST (5:40 p.m. PST) on
Dec. 2, 1998, will gather star-formation data, which have remained
invisible from beneath the obscuring effects of the Earth's
atmosphere.
The overall goal of the two-year mission is to gain a
greater understanding of star formation by determining the
composition of interstellar clouds, and establishing the means by
which these clouds cool as they collapse to form stars and
planets.
"During its mission, SWAS will observe hundreds of regions
of ongoing star formation within our galaxy. The answers SWAS
will provide are important not only to the understanding of the
formation of future stellar systems, but also to the understanding
of the processes that led to the formation of the Sun, the Earth,
and the other planets and moons in our own solar system," said Dr.
Gary Melnick, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics,
principal investigator for the SWAS mission.
SWAS will be launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base, CA,
via a Pegasus-XL launch vehicle, built by Orbital Sciences
Corporation. The launch vehicle is a three-stage, solid-
propellant booster system carried aloft by an L-1011 jet aircraft.
The system will be released when the aircraft reaches an altitude
of about 40,000 feet (12,200 meters) and has airspeed of Mach 0.8.
The SWAS mission is designed for a two-year duration.
SWAS is one of NASA's Small Explorers (SMEX) satellites,
which are both small and economical. The SWAS spacecraft weighs
only 625 pounds. The satellite was designed and built by NASA's
Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD.
The SWAS observatory will be inserted into an orbit with an
altitude of 370 miles above the Earth, and will orbit the Earth
every 97 minutes. SWAS will typically observe three to five
astronomical objects per orbit. The observed data will be stored
in the spacecraft memory and sent to a ground station. Within 24
hours of receipt at the ground station, these data are received at
the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory's Science Operation
Center in Cambridge, MA. There, the science content of the data
is analyzed and new astronomical targets are selected for
observation.
Further information about SWAS can be found on the Internet
at:
http://sunland.gsfc.nasa.gov/smex/swas/
http://sunland.gsfc.nasa.gov/smex/
http://pluto.harvard.edu/cfa/oir/Research/swas.html
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